I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (26 page)

I said I had it on good authority that the Amish play ball in uniform or in civvies all over Lancaster. He claimed not to know. I badgered. I had to see them in their element, I told him.

After some time, he relented. “All right,” he said. “Now. You don’t know who told you. And please don’t use my name. We’re not allowed to have our names printed. And you have to be careful, now. The Amish don’t want no reporters.” Then he asked if I had GPS and gave me coordinates.

I waited two full days at the coordinates he gave me. Empty clasps clanged against a flagpole. I found out that mooing cows sound incredibly frustrated. To do
something, anything,
I started and stopped e-reading
Ball Four
and
The Natural
and Roger Angell’s baseball compendiums. I flipped between
Bull Durham
and
Moneyball
and
Field of Dreams
on my iPad in the shade. Nothing.

Some weeks later, after a couple more trips spent staking out diamonds around Lancaster, I settled on one behind a century-old general store. It had a hitching post, sheds for dugouts, and a two-story chain link fence about three hundred feet from home. I installed myself on a bench beyond the fence in left field. I waited. The late-morning air was thick with oily wafts of mown grass. The heat loitered. At some point, I fell asleep.

When I heard a
thud
and opened my eyes, I saw a small boy riding by atop a miniature buggy pulled by a Shetland pony. I figured I was dreaming. Then came another
thud,
closer, and I turned my head in time to dodge a yellow softball one-hopping directly at my face.

Ballplayers, at last. Ten of them. They wore athletic shorts and cleats, but I knew they were Amish because they chattered misaligned English in elfin accents.

“Attaway, Amo!” shouted the guy nearest to me in left. “That’s how you Tootsie Roll!”

This was practice. They were a competitive slow-pitch team. I tossed the softball back over the fence. The fielder said, “Sorry, sir.”

These boys were from liberal families. They had filled the parking lot with forty-thousand-dollar trucks and big white Escalades bought with the money they earned working trades or construction right after middle school. (Should they decide to join the church, their vehicles will wind up in fields full of near-new cars with
FOR SALE
signs in their windshields.)

The kid at bat launched one on a directly proportional incline. It cleared the fence and burst the treetop above me, the ball then falling into my hands ahead of flittering leaves. I asked if I could shag flies with them. They waved me over. I ran to get my glove from the trunk of my rental car.

I would prefer to keep with genre standards and describe these boys as a dugout’s worth of motley
isolatos.
But I can’t. They were as chippily uniform as a litter of golden retriever puppies: long limbs, tanned bodies, unstylish haircuts. The sons of farmers and craftsmen. They used Pennsylvania Dutch for jokes they didn’t want me to hear; for everything else, musty English learned in school.

They were eighteen, nineteen, but clearly had never been coached. Some stood in the batter’s box with their feet touching. One lefty pinced his right knee and elbow together crabwise before swinging. Another held the bat above his head as if preparing to kill a snake. Categorically, they creamed the ball.

In the field, their every throw sizzled. They jumped into the path of hit balls as though playing through a memory. They dropped to one knee, two knees, laid out horizontally—whatever it took to block grounders. A freak hop bloodied the shortstop’s nose, and the cheer from right field was “Ya, looks
like ya need another Red
BOOL,
Morty!” Everybody laughed but me; Morty’s smile was wishboned by blood. “Ya, buy it with your credit card, Credit Card!” went the pitcher.

I’ve played enough to feel okay saying: never before had I seen a team of young men be so good without also being repulsively cocksure. These guys had a prelapsarian sweetness about them. This straight
joy
that I last knew as an adolescent dicking around with my friends Friday afternoons on a pebbly field behind a RadioShack.

I was never great or even very good. I couldn’t hit a bear in the ass with a banjo. (Or, as Papa Lou put it, I “couldn’t buy myself a hit in a Chinese opium den.”) At the plate, I was confounded by pitches that rode too fast, broke too hard, popped in the catcher’s mitt behind me like a paper bag full of air. My game was defense. I could play most anywhere, but I begged off from center field and second base. Center because of the spotlighted solitude of in-game fly balls. Second because the throw to first was so short. Both because there was so much time to
think.

My dad videotaped what ended up being my last Colt League game. In it, I expertly snare a two-hopper several steps to my backhand side. Then I just
stare
at the first baseman with the smiley grimace of a guy waiting to get punched in the face. When I finally force the throw from second, it scatters the upper bleachers. This was the first of
four
such throws. That was it for me.

Lots of people walk away from a beloved sport once they come of age. They tire of the game. Develop new interests. Maybe they finally refuse to be a parent’s proxy, wearing a uniform in a man’s stead like a Civil War substitute. That’s not why I dropped baseball. Baseball, I think, is different.

What makes it such a great children’s pastime is also what makes it so goddamned difficult for even proto-adults to play well. As major league pitcher Ron Darling famously said: “Most
people have the physical ability to play this game. To excel in it, I think it’s in your head.” What he meant is: if you are conscious of yourself—like, at all—baseball will eat you alive. It measures you against an absolute standard—1.000 batting average, 1.000 fielding average, 0.00 earned-run average—and it reminds you every step of the way that you are falling short. If you can’t handle that, if you get interrupted by the infinite regression of anxiety and doubt (… 
I made
that
throw, which excuses me for striking out last inning, but I’m still 0-for-11 lately, and I double-clutched on that fielder’s choice, which Ross’ll remember but not mention because he stockpiles my errors like they’re his own critical deterrents, and SON OF A BITCH, back up the bag
 …), you are fucked.

To be good, you have to be either so self-assured as to be nigh catatonic, or you have to choose to pay attention in the most literal way. That is, you have to realize that your attention is a valuable, finite resource, and how you choose to spend it the one skill—not speed, not power—that separates the wheat from the chaff.

“Control your thoughts before they control you,” I triple-underlined years ago in my dog-eared copy of
The Mental Game of Baseball,
the big-leaguer’s Bible. “If there’s no future, there’s no distraction.”

According to the book, the easiest way to achieve this stillness was to vacate yourself and enter the mind of the pitcher or the batter. To be forever considering: What’s the pitcher’s best stuff, and what’s his best today? What sequence of pitches has he gotten this guy out with in the past? What’s the situation in the game, and what does the hitter want to accomplish? Is there something about this ballpark and this day—short porch in left, wind blowing out, his last embarrassing at bat—that could affect that desire? Which base would I cover or throw to if he got his way? Or if he didn’t? What would be the permutation of all our failed intentions?

If not this empathy, then the book said your only other choice was to keep a lid on your brain. Force your conscious world to fit inside every next pitch. Abridge yourself. Play in a gnomic present. And labor to maintain this link to your surroundings, always, if you’re to have a snowball’s chance.

I managed neither. And the more I matured, the more self-consciousness snuck into the cracks of my play and pulled me apart like weeds taking ruins back to nature. I couldn’t help it. Weak grounders skipping toward me took on the aspect of pebbles leading a rockslide. I’d flub one, then another, and another—and each error would feel like one more stone stacked on my chest, death by crushing. I’d look to my dad in the dugout. Where he stood, the sun reflected off his aviator lenses in a single molten beam, focused on me. If I tried to maintain eye contact with him while jogging back to the bench, his stare would burn a blue hole in the center of my vision that got bigger the closer to him I got. I was not a ballplayer, I knew. I was a head case.

The Amish, though. They didn’t seem to care who was watching. One after another, they stropped pitches over the fence. “Hyume run!” they said. “Holy smokes!”

Four Amish girls in heart-shaped bonnets stopped walking dogs to curl their fingers around the chain links. They had light eyes and sheer cheeks. “You girls runnin’ around, are ya now?” asked Aaron, the left fielder. He nodded to the boy at the plate, who then knocked one deep into the gap. I took a few perfunctory strides. Aaron ran hard enough to lose his hat. Then he dove, snagged the liner backhanded, and rolled into a somersault before springing to his feet. The ball was sticking half out of the top of his glove—a snow cone, you call it—and he feigned a lick. The girls tittered.

As Aaron and I trotted in from the outfield, I asked how his Rumspringa’d been.

“Na, ya know. Other than ball, running around makes me feel restless.”

He told me they had a playoff game that evening at a different park. I made him type the address directly into my phone.

Along the old Philadelphia Pike, between Lancaster City and Intercourse, traffic coagulated. Tourist vehicles braked to take in each buggy that jangled down the extra-wide shoulders. So many signs were crowded at the road’s edge—signs for clocks, jams, buggy rides, pretzels, Old Amish apples, Old Amish peaches, Old Amish furniture, country knives, a stay at the Old Amish motel, the Amish Experience—and they all were angled and a little desperate, like raised hands eager to answer a question. This was something I’d read about, how acres of farmland were going for $17,500-per at auction, so only half of the Amish in Lancaster could still afford to farm. The rest were moving to other states, or adjusting to nine-to-five workdays punctuated with leisure time. At a red light, I watched a family of six hit the Susquehanna Bank branch, barefoot.

Stopping and going, I snapped photos of sprawling Amish estates, their roofs flanneled with solar cells. When I looked through the shots on the digital viewfinder, I noticed that surrounding the farms were English homes on artificial rises. They were stone houses of an imagined rusticity, built by well-off retirees who had push-pinned American flags on sticks all over the property. These houses managed to seem both really invasive and really conscious of not seeming invasive, looky-loos with hands folded behind their backs.

This is the attraction, this
idea
of the Amish. That we might come to Lancaster and encounter what appears to be our past, the simple, rich, idyllic existence back when our freedom
from
had yet to develop into our freedom
to.
Here’s what we could have been had we stayed the inevitable.

It’s both condescending and a self-deception, of course, this idea. But in my car, I had to admit: it’s hard to lay off of. When I saw Amish in buggies waving across two lanes of traffic, it cheered me up. Their homogeneous presence was a merry sight, like nuns in habits at the airport. It’s a relief to know that people still live this way, because as these sorts of Jeffersonian fundamentals shrink further from our world, I find it more necessary than ever that someone harvest summer corn, cultivate virtue, play baseball. Abandoning that would mean something about us was dead, or at the very least outgrown.

I took a seat on the bleachers next to a stout Amish man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He’d taken off his clodhoppers so he could fan his toes on the row in front. Our view past the outfield fence was a darkening one of barns riding the corduroy swells of corn like arks. The floodlights switched on.

“Looks like rain,” said the man next to me, whom let’s call “Dan” because, were his real name to appear in print, he’d be censured by the faithful. “What’s your phone say?”

This was the semifinal of a local league championship, the fifth game of a best-of-five series. The Amish boys had won the first two; the English men the last. About eighty or so Amish had come to watch. They outnumbered the English four to one.

Many were families, but most were young men from fast districts. They looked just like middle-American teens on television, all swooped bangs and skinny jeans tucked into fat-tongued sneakers. The few girls wore dresses and bonnets. The prettiest one sat in a truck that idled while “Call Me Maybe” spritzed through the cracked windows.

I told Dan that my weather app was saying all clear. In the dugout, the Amish boys brought it in and chanted, “One, two, three—KICK ASS!” before flowering their hands. I cringed and
waited for the communal reprimand, but none came. A cloth-freckling rain began to fall.

The English team was sponsored by a construction company. They looked to be men of a mean utility, ornamented with sun-blued tattoos. “I know it’s tough, but if he’s throwing that short shit,” their burly coach instructed them, “take all the pitches.”

The Amish boys conducted themselves through warm-up drills. They wore gray jerseys and white pants, some belted and some held up with suspenders. I asked Dan if he was cool with these kids wearing uniforms instead of their Ordnung-prescribed trousers. “For now,” he said. “When they’re married, their clothes will be their uniforms. In terms of God, I mean.”

The first couple innings were tight. The Amish turned a smart 6-4-3 double play. The English retired them 1-2-3. They accepted umps’ close calls with nodded equanimity.

The rain picked up, sprouting umbrellas. In the field, the boys tensed and attended to the ball. The English cracked two home runs that left the park trailing tails of sound. “Sit! Sit! Sit!” Dan called out to the Amish boy who’d just swung and missed so hard he spun off his feet. The boy then looped a double. “There you go, that’s what happens when you sit.”